500 Word Summary of
Dewey’s “Experience & Education”

According to Dewey good education should
have both a societal purpose and purpose for the individual student.
For Dewey, the long-term matters, but so does the short-term quality of an
educational experience. Educators are responsible, therefore, for
providing students with experiences that are immediately valuable and which
better enable the students to contribute to society.

Dewey criticizes traditional education for lacking in
holistic understanding of students and designing curricula overly focused
on content rather than content and process which is judged by its
contribution to the well-being of individuals and society.

On the other hand, progressive education, he argues,
is too reactionary and takes a free approach without really knowing how or
why freedom can be most useful in education. Freedom for the sake of
freedom is a weak philosophy of education. Dewey argues that we must
move beyond this paradigm war, and to do that we need a theory of
experience.

Thus, Dewey argues that educators must first
understand the nature of human experience.

Dewey's theory is that experience arises from the interaction of two
principles -- continuity and interaction. Continuity is that
each experience a person has will
influence his/her future, for better or for worse.
Interaction refers to the situational influence on one's experience.
In other words, one's present experience is a function of the
interaction between one's past experiences and the present situation.
For example, my experience of a lesson, will depend on how the teacher
arranges and facilitates the lesson, as well my past experience of similar
lessons and teachers.

It is important to understand that, for Dewey, no
experience has pre-ordained value. Thus, what may be a rewarding
experience for one person, could be a detrimental experience for another.

The value of the experience is to be judged by the
effect that experience has on the individual's present, their future, and
the extent to which the individual is able to contribute to society.

Dewey says that once we have a theory of experience,
then as educators can set about progressively organizing our subject
matter in a way that it takes accounts of students' past experiences, and
then provides them with experiences which will help to open up, rather
than shut down, a person's access to future growth experiences, thereby
expanding the person's likely contribution to society.

Dewey examines his theory
of experience in light of practical educational problems, such as the
debate between how much freedom vs.
discipline to use. Dewey shows that his theory of experience (continuity and
interaction) can be useful guides to help solving such issues.

Throughout, there is a
strong emphasis on the subjective quality of a student's experience and
the necessity for the teacher of understanding the students' past
experiences in order to effectively design a sequence of liberating
educational experiences to allow the person to fulfil their potential as
a member of society.